“It’s not every day one of the biggest companies in the world changes its mind, but we are thankful that Google now sees bisexual people just like everyone else,” said BiNet USA President Faith Cheltenham. “It will take time for bisexual search terms to be ranked as they were before the ban, but now bisexual people and their allies have a fighting chance to be seen, heard, and understood.”

Yes it is isn't it. Realizing that a lot of this is history is from rumor, conjecture and back-channel chats, but here is what appears to have happened.

In 2009-ish Google slightly fiddled with some it's search algorithms to help keep pornish-type stuff from overwhelming every search on the internet. As part of that effort a black-list of so-called "dirty words" was created. When creating the list Google cast a very (very, very) wide net, I'd guess it's because they figured "better safe that sorry" and that it was easier to remove the stuff that was swept in by accident.

Quite a few of the words that were rounded up and black-listed pertained to the LGBTQ+ community, and while sure there was porn associated with them (cause lets face it there can and is porn associated with almost anything theses days), that is pretty much secondary to their regular important function of allowing LGBTQ+ rights and community to flourish and grow.

By 2010 a petition to unblock the words "lesbian and bisexual" was up and gathering signatures, articles were written and even the big guns of popular culture got involved. Meanwhile back at the ranch, Google's Help Desk was saying "the block" was "a bug" and would be fixed. After a while all the fuss (and the intervention of mainstream LGBTQ+ groups such as GLAAD, et. al.) had an effect and almost all of the LGBTQ+ words were removed from the list . . . except for one word that it seemed none of the various concerned citizens and activist types thought worth removing . . . can you guess which one that would be?

In June of 2011 in an otherwise Google-positive piece Bi Media pointed out the problem saying, "when you type in words like ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ the search engine’s predictive search kicks in and offers suggestions of what you might be looking for as you type, when you type ‘bisexual’ that doesn’t happen. It seems google thinks the b-word is a bad word." Words "lesbian" had been unblocked but "bisexual" still remained.

And there the matter sat until it was taken up by BiNet USA president Faith Cheltenham who (in addition to being a brand-new mom, a sometimes stand-up comedian and the president of the USA's venerable nationwide bisexual equivalent of say an HRC) is also a computer programmer, and as a technical person even more in some ways than as a LGBTQ Activist it worried and irked her. And she kept at it, carefully documenting her findings as seen in her excellent July 18th 2012 HuffPo piece, "Google's Bisexual Problem".